All of these songs have really strong sentiments, but they aren’t quite the same as expressing your unique thoughts and feelings for your intended yourself. But if, like my 10CC-loving friend, you lack the skill, AI could help you craft something a bit more specific for your intended. - The Conversation
Some 151 million people attended nearly 55,000 Live Nation events in 2024, an increase of 4% year-on-year, the events and ticketing company said in its full-year earnings report on Thursday (February 20). - Music Business Worldwide
Seeing the seams is part of live performance’s charm—it asks the audience to actively participate in the suspension of reality, as opposed to having it ready-made for them. Broadcast opera retains some of that immediacy, but without the magic of a live performance, it’s harder to forgive its failings. - The Atlantic
Next season the company will experiment with scheduling consecutive performances of the same opera with different casts, this to save money by not moving sets in and out of the theater. There will be more performances of the most popular repertory staples and fewer performances of contemporary works on weekends. - AP
"(Starting in) the late twentieth century, a family of technologies moved from the fringes of novelty attraction and the avant-garde to the heart of mainstream culture. … The main character in this story is a device named for its ability to fabricate music artificially, producing sounds that are, by definition, synthetic." - Literary Hub
This is the latest event to be canceled by the Kennedy Center since the Trump takeover. The show “Finn,” which could be read as a metaphor for the LGBTQ+ experience, was also canceled. - OperaWire
As Messiaen saw it, the real revolution in 20th-century music had been launched not by an Austrian Jew but by a Frenchman, Claude Debussy, who ‘introduced the idea of haziness, not only in harmony and melody, but above all in rhythm and in the succession of timbres’. - London Review of Books
If genes and grit are not entirely responsible for the persistence of professional musical families across generations, what else matters? There are several possibilities. - Nightingale Sonata
Organizations across disciplines operated at a small deficit for the first time in five years in 2023. Choruses, by contrast, were still operating at a surplus on average. In 2019, about two thirds of the choruses reported surpluses, while in 2023 roughly half still reported surpluses. - SMU Cultural Data
The key findings of the Annual Field Report are drawn from the fiscal year 2023 data submitted by OPERA America’s Professional Company Members (PCMs) in the annual Professional Opera Survey administered by SMU Data Arts. - Opera America
Marching band is more than a pastime. It’s an extreme sport. The real reason the students rehearse so hard isn’t to play well at football games. It’s to prepare for a series of fiercely competitive marching-band contests in the fall, culminating in the Grand National Championships, in Indianapolis. - The New Yorker
Joshua Barone makes the case for such works as Samuel Barber's Vanessa, Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes’s Street Scene, Marc Blitzstein’s Regina, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, and Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe. - The New York Times
"The principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra was threatened with a defamation action for his comments about chorus members at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. … Gardner said: 'The chorus is made up of two rival Mafia families — who after one performance put each other in (the emergency room)." - BBC
There’s never been a better time in history to be an intermediary, a middleman, a hanger-on, an aggregator, a shyster. For a guitarist or keyboardist or singer, not so much. - The Honest Broker
